Today is the anniversary of Apollo 11’s launch mission to the moon, and what better day for Netflix to announce their latest film, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure, a live-action/animation hybrid from writer/director Richard Linklater.
Deadline reports Netflix will distribute Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure, which is largely influenced by Linklater’s childhood growing up in Houston, TX. The background is 1969 with the story told from two perspectives: that of an astronaut and crew as they embark on the historic mission, and that of an excited kid who is obsessed with NASA and watches on TV like millions of others did.
The cast Linklater has put together is top-notch and includes Jack Black, Zachary Levi, Glen Powell, Josh Wiggins, Milo Coy, Lee Eddy, Bill Wise, Natalie L’Amoreaux, Jessica Brynn Cohen, Sam Chipman, and Danielle Guilbot.
The live-action portion completed filming in March, and now the animation side is being taken care of. That gives it a leg up towards completion, so the wait for it may not be too long. As of right now, Netflix has yet to set an official date.
Netflix seems like the right place for Linklater right now. His last few films, Where’d You Go Bernadette, Last Flag Flying, and Everybody Wants Some didn’t really connect with audiences like his earlier stuff, or even something as recent as Boyhood. Perhaps a reunion with his School of Rock and Bernie star is just what the doctor ordered.
To be fair, ripping off Fatal Attraction is nothing new. There have been plenty of copycats over the years about an “affair gone wrong” thriller movie, but unfortunately, Fatal Affair (which even almost copies the title of the classic) simply doesn’t work. The plot is rather simple (as most of the genre is), but the execution also hinders.
Lawyer Ellie (the ever-ageless Nia Long) and her architect husband Marcus (Stephen Bishop) is approaching that midlife moment of their marriage. Their daughter has gone off to college, so they are ready for the empty nester phase of their marriage. They have moved out of the city to a beachfront home where Ellie can now open and run her own private practice, while Marcus continues to rehab from an auto accident, which displays that Ellie’s a little frustrated in the bedroom.
On Ellie’s last day of work at her law firm, she meets former college friend David (Omar Epps), who’s an IT consultant hired for a case she’s closing. Being that they are old friends, they agree to hang out after work. While everything is casual and old friends catching up at first, the liquor kicks in, and soon enough the two are getting hot a steamy in the bathroom at the lounge. Ellie calls things off just before their session gets too serious, but that then opens a Pandoras Box, which drives just about all of the “plot” of Fatal Affair.
We get to learn that David’s somewhat of a psycho and starts a game of cat and mouse with Ellie as he stalks in person and via the internet, cause he’s a highly skilled hacker (even though we never see him do one thing with a computer besides deleting an e-mail). David embeds himself into Ellie’s life by dating and brainwashing her colleague Courtney (Maya Stojan) and hanging out golfing with Ellie’s husband Marcus. For the most part, David’s able to stay in the shadows and continues terrorizing Ellie because he “loves her.” But soon enough, we get a third act confrontation that’s incredibly cliched until Fatal Affair comes to its inevitable conclusion. That’s not to say it’s all doom and gloom for the quality of Fatal Affair. Nia Long works with the script and manages to elevate above the material. She really needs more work as she’s still a fine actress as you remember from her late 90s/early 2000s bloom.
However, the main culprit in the movie is the writing, directing, and the villain David. Omar Epps, who normally is a great actor (as evidenced by his guest-starring role on This Is Us this past season), just doesn’t do psycho well. Not one moment he has on screen is authentic or even believable. He comes across as cartoonish villain and any evil man in a Tyler Perry movie (not A Fall From Grace bad, but pretty close). There are even a few moments where he’s supposed to go from 0-100 to show his mental instability, and it unfortunately just doesn’t feel right. This might be due to the script, which probably said “just act mean and crazy” instead of having a dialogue, but it’s a completely wasted opportunity for an actor who normally delivers in his roles. Chalk it up to him not normally playing a bad guy in movies.
That said, if you want to turn your brain off for 89 minutes and have a fun time watching a (non-erotic) erotic thriller, Fatal Affair won’t bee too bad and enjoyable for some parts. It’s definitely a 90s throwback that will have you yelling at the screen for all the crazy, predictable, silly, and fun twists and turns the movie has.
Possessor is not your typical assassin movie. But then, we probably shouldn’t expect it to be considering it comes from Brandon Cronenberg, the son of director David Cronenberg who made a splash with Antiviral back in 2012, and that film was not your typical body horror.
Starring Andrea Riseborough, who has become Sundance’s resident darling of late, Possessor centers on an assassin who uses advanced technology that allows her to “possess” the body of others, the easier to eliminate her targets. But what is the cost of constantly merging with other people? How easy is it to lose one’s sense of self? What unfolds is a nightmarish thriller that sees the psychological barriers torn down in horrific ways.
As you probably guessed, I’ve already seen this one and found it to be the best of what we’ve seen from Cronenberg. His sophomore effort shows tremendous growth as a filmmaker, using gore and the sounds of violence to wicked precision. Of course, Riseborough is brilliant in capturing the lead character’s psychotic break, and she’s joined by an equally terrific cast that includes Christopher Abbott, Sean Bean, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tuppence Middleton.
NEON plans to release Possessor “soon” but does not yet have a date.
SYNOPSIS: From the visionary mind of writer/director Brandon Cronenberg, POSSESSOR is an arresting sci-fi thriller about elite, corporate assassin Tasya Vos. Using brain-implant technology, Vos takes control of other people’s bodies to execute high profile targets. As she sinks deeper into her latest assignment Vos becomes trapped inside a mind that threatens to obliterate her.
With COVID-19 seemingly ruining so many of the movies we were anticipating for 2020, it’s good to know that Netflix has us covered. The streamer has announced they’ll release the star-studded film The Devil All the Time, which features pretty much everybody that we all like in one movie, this September.
The Devil All the Time stars Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Sebastian Stan, Mia Wasikowska, Bill Skarsgard, Haley Bennett, Riley Keough, Eliza Scanlen, and Jason Clarke. Hot damn. And to think, it almost had Chris Evans, too. You’ve got a couple of Marvel alums, Batman, Pennywise, Beth March, Terminator, a Mad Max: Fury Road star, and Bennett, who is just a damn fine actress who recently starred in the acclaimed film Swallow.
So who’s in charge of all this? That would be director Antonio Campos, known for the films Afterschool and Christine, both of which made a big splash on the festival circuit. Suffice it to say there will be a lot more eyes on this than anything he’s done before.
The film is based on Donald Ray Pollock’s novel that follows a strange assortment of characters from WWII to the 1960s. Here’s the book breakdown:
“Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.”
The Devil All the Time debuts on Netflix on September 16th.
Apple is spending the big bucks to attract as much high-profile talent and movies to their fledgling streaming network. Just last week we saw the release of the naval warfare drama Greyound, and recently AppleTV+ has added Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the acclaimed doc Boys State, Snow Blind with Jake Gyllenhaal, and the Will Smith/Antonie Fuqua slavery drama Emancipation.
And now, Apple has acquired Palmer, a redemption story starring Justin Timberlake and directed by actor/filmmaker Fisher Stevens. The film stars Timberlake as a former college football star who, after a stint in prison, returns to his hometown to turn his life around. The script was written by Cheryl Guerriero, with Stevens directing his first feature since 2012’s Stand Up Guys. The cast includes Juno Temple, June Squibb, Alisha Wainright, and newcomer Ryder Allen.
This is a return to acting for Timberlake, who had a pretty solid run of leading man roles before mostly abandoning it after 2013’s Runner Runner. Stevens is probably best known for his acting roles, including both Short Circuit movies, but he’s also an Oscar-winning filmmaker having won for the documentary The Cove.
I framed the headline that way for a reason because OF COURSE Alden Ehrenreich would play Han Solo again. And what would it take for him to do it? The only real answer is that Disney/Lucasfilm just needs to ask, and he’ll be there. However, the Solo actor was on the Happy Sad Confused podcast and was more diplomatic about the possibility of playing the iconic character once more…
“I would. It would have to be the right version of it,” he admits. “What’s cool and kind of free, in a way, is the real fun of (Han Solo), my favorite part of that character, is something that kicks in at the end of the movie. You know, it’s when he becomes that guy at the end, that’s the guy we love. So getting to that, and kind of going from there is interesting so we’ll see.”
“But I think now they’re being so inventive with how they’re using Star Wars and putting out stories in a different way that maybe I could see some out of the box interesting iteration of it somewhere, we’ll see, who knows?”
What he failed to say is that with all of the new stuff Lucasfilm is doing, none of it pertains to Han Solo, due to the poor response specifically to Ehrenreich’s take on him. Now, I quite enjoyed Solo and saw it as the first true popcorn movie in the entire Star Wars franchise, but there’s no escaping the fact that it did badly at the box office.
Like any good action movie trailer the bullets are flying in force throughout the 2 minute trailer for director Brian Skiba’s film The 2nd. If you follow these types of things you’ll know there was a period in Hollywood where most of the action movies pitched were done so using the line “Die Hard in an X (plane, bus, train, etc)”. I was always kinda bummed that this trend stopped, I guess that’s why I was so psyched after seeing the trailer for this flick which can only be described as Die Hard in a school. If that’s not cool enough you can throw in two of my old school fav’s Ryan Phillippe and Casper Van Dien. Van Dien, who I’ve only ever seen play a good guy seems like he was barking up the wrong tree all these years, if this trailer is to be believe he makes for a rad baddie.
Official Synopsis:
While picking his son up from college, Secret Service Agent Vic Davies finds himself in the middle of a high stakes terrorist operation and now must use his entire set of skills against the armed faction.
Check out the trailer below and look for The 2nd September 1st, 2020 On Demand and Digital!
The 2nd
Starring:
Ryan Phillippe, Casper Van Dien, Jack Griffo, Lexi Simonsen
Five American soldiers get shown that the horrors of WWII extend beyond the battlefield in Ghosts of War. Chris (Brenton Thwaites) and his platoon have been given orders to relieve other soldiers guarding a French Chateau. Chris’s team is made up of Tappert (Kyle Gallner), Eugene (Skylar Astin), Butchie (Alan Ritchson), and Kirk (Theo Rossi). Tappert is a troubled sniper with some darkness in his past. Eugene is pretty much the brains of the group while Butchie is the brawn. Kirk is quick to entertain with a story, even though everyone knows they are bullshit. Not everyone is best friends, but they have each other’s back.
Even as they march across enemy territory things begin to seem off to Chris. Images in shadows, bad dreams, an eerie sense of dread – possibly attributed to the stress of war…but maybe not. Upon laying eyes on the chateau, the men are ecstatic. Finally, a central place with a roof over their heads, beds to sleep in, and food. With these comforts, it does seem curious that the soldiers currently guarding the Chateau are so eager to leave. The team is quick to learn why as almost instantly the spirits within the house began tormenting them. At first smaller things – something falls over, lights go out suddenly, distant noises that may or may not be screams. Then the intensity is ratcheted up, and the soldiers realize they are in more trouble than they thought.
Ghosts of War is full of issues. The first being that the film has slim to no character development whatsoever. It’s so scarce that some of the soldier’s names aren’t even uttered until well into the flick. We know nothing about these people except brief stories from the past and a mention or two of family. This in turn makes it difficult to truly care or form bonds to any of the major players in the film. Horror movies are notorious for boneheaded decisions. This trend continues in full force as a questionable decision after questionable decision keeps getting made. Ghosts of War never truly commits to being a war film or supernatural film and ends up subpar at both.
The scares throughout Ghost of War are mostly cheap jump scares. Someone looks away, looks back, loud noise, and ghost – BOO! I will say that there are a couple of clever shots writer and director Eric Bress inserts into the film. While I did appreciate these brief moments, they are few and far between. In a nutshell, Ghosts of War is comprised of uninspiring characters trudging around a giant house. Then they see a ghost and somehow, we’re at the next scene with only that encounter getting a mention a fraction of the time. To his credit, Bress does try and mix things up, but any twist ultimately falls flat. Ghosts of War is full of typical horror clichés and does not bring anything remotely new to the table. There are far better options than Ghosts of War, and I think you won’t regret passing on this one.
“Here you are, standing on the precipice of something so much bigger than anyone here. But always remember, you are not alone,” Andy Samberg’s Nyles tells a crowd of wedding guests in the new film Palm Springs. The quote seems a little on the nose for a time-loop rom-com released during current political events. With COVID-19, quarantine, Black Lives Matter, and plenty of other social movements reaching their respective heads this summer, it truly feels like we are at the beginning of something so much bigger than our current existence. Though these times are difficult, I am reminded, time and time again, mainly through TikTok videos and social media, that we are not going through this alone.
All this being said, Andy Siara, the writer who wrote that quote, along with every other word in the PalmSprings’ script, didn’t plan for his film to be released in Quarantine and couldn’t anticipate how his words would hit differently during this time. Like us, Samberg’s Nyles has been reliving the same day over and over again, only he has been sucked into an actual time loop, reliving the same day over and over again. Far past trying to fix it, the commitment-phobe, carefree guy, just trying to attend a wedding in Palm Springs, has embraced his situation to the point of happily not caring anymore. This changes when Sarah (Cristin Milioti), the bride’s sister, gets sucked in the loop along with him, giving Nyles’ world meaning again.
The script is funny and deep, full of millennial humor and insecurity. Behind all that, is a writer with immense talent and not a lot of credits…yet. Siara graduated from the American Film Institute (AFI) in 2015, where he met the film’s director Max Barbakow and where the idea for the film started to form. After graduation, the two tried to get the film made, while Siara worked on the short-lived AMC show, Lodge 49, which has since developed a cult following. Eventually, The Lonely Island, which Samberg is apart of, became involved and the movie was greenlit, premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, selling for $17.5 million and 69 cents, the highest-selling film in the festival’s history. In February, it was announced that he would be teaming up with Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail on the dark comedy series The Resort. Clearly, if Siara puts the same dedication, thought, and research into his future endeavors that he put into Palm Springs, then he personally might be at the precipice of something bigger. And yes, he is very aware of the people
I chatted with Siara over the phone to discuss those people and the script in-depth, looking at its origins, inspirations, and the evolution of one of the tightest scripts of the year.
It’s really wonderful to watch something that’s not only fun and enjoyable, but clearly a lot of effort was put into it. I know the very early script for Palm Springs, sort of came about when you were studying at AFI, where you met the eventual its eventual director, Max Barbakow. Can you tell me a little bit about where the idea came from and then how Max got involved?
Max and I met on the very first day at AFI and we bonded over the bands, Pavement and The Replacements, and our love a certain tonal balance. I think Eastbound & Down had just wrapped up their final season, and that tonal balance, especially that final season where you can go from moments of guttural laughter to guttural tears. Those guys have like mastered that tonal balance, I think. So Max and I made a couple of shorts together at AFI and then when we finished in June of 2015, we were like ‘Let’s do our first movie together. We don’t know what it is but let’s do something that is cheap and maybe we can find someone to help us make it, but at least we’ll make it for ourselves.” So we went out to Palm Springs and kind of a had our little lost weekend to try to figure out like what do we want to do? What is the story we want to tell? We left that weekend not really knowing exactly, but we did have the kernel of a character. And that character was Nyles that we kind of made modern-day nihilist adjacent, perhaps.
How apropos of his name then!
Oh yeah! (Laughs) Yeah, we lacked subtlety in some places.
I mean it works!
I’m cool with certain things that are just so on the nose that they’re absurd and I think that’s one of them. So we knew we wanted it set in Palm Springs, make it for cheap, very cheap, and we knew what this character was. And then it was just through endless conversation that it naturally evolved into what it eventually became, which was this time loop, wedding movie that’s a love story at its core about these two very lonely commitment-phobe people navigating their situation. A lot of that was pulled from my own life. I got married in 2015, in the desert. I was also going to a ton of weddings at the time and I love a good wedding.
But a good wedding can be hard to come by.
(Laughs) I mean I’ve been to so many bad weddings too. I think the sign of a good wedding is when I actually don’t know the people, but if I can be brought to tears during their vows, that’s a special moment. Seeing love on display, it warms my heart. And then there’s also so many terrible weddings that you can just tell that these people will probably be together forever, but it’s not going to be happy. Whereas, some of the ones where I am brought to tears at the vows, I know that’s true, great love there. But, who knows that might only be for the next two years and then they get a divorce, but at least they have that moment. It’s a lot of those feelings that went into those conversations that Max and I had as we’re navigating our own shame and fear and hopes for our futures and whatnot. And from those conversations, I would take all that and just go start writing. We kind of found the story of it all through the writing. There was never like a roadmap and five years ago, we weren’t saying, “Let’s do our version of Groundhog Day.” We kind of stumbled upon that over after many false starts over two years, probably.
That actually leads really well to my next question. Besides Groundhog Day, what philosophical and cinematic influences did you draw from when writing the script and when filming?
On the movie front, Rachel Getting Married was a huge one. I personally love that movie so much. It kind of helped us solidify shooting a wedding because you have these moments where you have the highest of highs meeting the lowest of lows and weddings have the tendency to bring out demons. The Great Beauty was another one we would reference a lot. In the much bigger budget version of this movie….in our dreams, we wanted an opening dance scene that was as intense and in your face as that opening dance scene in The Great Beauty. Eternal Sunshine [of the Spotless Mind], was another staple of our “somewhat” youth. Raising Arizona, Inside Llewyn Davis, this kind of circuitous storytelling that Llewyn Davis had. While it’s not like a time loop movie, there is this sense of like you’re just kind of on a treadmill there. We looked to that. Patterson came out, that Jim Jarmusch movie, just as I had gone off to start writing this thing. I think we saw that together and that is, in a sense, a time-loop movie that is not a time-loop movie. Every day is just the same for Adam Driver’s character. On the film side, those are some big references. Once I started writing, Max had given me his copy of Be Here Now, the Ram Dass philosophical ramblings. (Laughs) Max had a hundred post-it notes all throughout it with little scribbles in there of just little Max ramblings. So I looked to that a lot. Every day before I would start writing, I open up to a random page and then read one of those. Read the page and then read Max’s a little post-it note. That was almost like an inspirational centering thing to do every day. I feel like Niles believes he might be Zen, he believes he might be enlightening, but as we see he’s not necessarily. So, it just helped taking some kind of philosophical ramblings like that, and then what I would do is try to undercut it in the script.
How did the Lonely Island and Andy Samberg get involved in the project and what is the greatest thing they brought to the script?
I finished the script sometime in 2017 and at that point, it was just me and Max and we were like, “Ok, well does anyone want to help us make this?” We didn’t really know how to go about doing that. But then around that time, I got hooked up with a manager, Sam Warren at LBI, and he was like, “I love this, I know what to do with it.” And he passed it around and then eventually the agents for The Lonely Island got it. And Andy read it. I’m pretty sure the offer was to ask him to star in it and also produce. Andy then brought me and Max in. You know, we knew that it was like a first-time writer, first-time director situation-”
Were you writing on Lodge 49 at this point?
Yes, but I mean like on the feature side, I had nothing. I think I had just got bumped up to a staff writer in the second season of Lodge. So, it was right around that time, but especially on the first-time director side of it, I think that’s where it was more of a calculated risk. But I think Andy and Becky [Sloviter], one of our producers, and Akiva [Schaffer], saw that for Max and I – this was our baby. We poured our hearts and souls into this. I personally remember leaving that first meeting going, “I hope to God, they want to do this because Andy would be perfect.” Andy understood this character and what we were going for, maybe even better than I understood it. That’s where their 20 years of experience comes in. Because I think both me and Max learned so much from those guys about storytelling, about making a movie, every part of the process. The movie got exponentially better because of them. I don’t know, I don’t feel like the movie could have existed without Andy being Nyles. Cause he got the character on such a deep level, probably better than I even understood the character.
I want to travel through time with Andy Samberg. I didn’t know that’s a thing I wanted, but here we are! There’s quite a bit of scientific thought that also went into the film, especially for its resolution. Tell me about the research that went into making the science seem legitimate because science in movies always seems to be stretched. Because though I have no scientific background, how you resolve everything doesn’t seem far off.
A couple of parts, but I’ll say, do we resolve everything? Do they get out of the loop? Does blowing up the cave actually work? So there’s that part. As for what Sara thinks might work, or what she convinces Nyles might work and what they actually try to do, was actually one of the last additions to the script. By that point, the script had already got to The Lonely Island. We were working with them and one of the big things that they kind of brought in in developing it a little further was to get Sarah to try to find a scientific way out of this. So I went on my own little – in my memory, it was one long, crazy night where I went down the YouTube spiral, but in reality, it was probably a couple of weeks of me really looking at it. It was a lot of YouTube videos on black holes and string theory. And then a lot of science papers, one in particular that I found that I liked was about the Cauchy horizon. Then I tried to cobble together a bunch of theories that like made sense to me, the guy who doesn’t really know that much, but hopefully make it believable enough. And then we did have some consultants on the movie just to make sure the science could kind of line up. It was more like, “if this cave and loop happened, then what could potentially be the way out of it?” rather than the question being, “Could this ever happen?” That was never it, it was more like, “we know that they are in a loop and that it’s caused by this cave.” That almost made it easier to come up with theories of how they could potentially get out. The physicist that Sarah is skyping with in the movie, I think he was actually one of our consultants. He’s a real scientist.
You can watch Palm Springs with your Hulu subscription or at your local drive-in.
Over-the-top action has sorta been the hallmark for director Michael Dowse, with films such as Stuber, Coffee & Kareem, and Goon on his resume. Even a film like Take Me Home Tonight, a retro comedy, has its share of exaggerated elements to it. Well, those talents are going to be put to good use in Dowse’s next film, an adaptation of the ridiculous video game Just Cause.
Deadline reports Dowse will direct a big screen version of Avalanche Studios’ Just Cause, an open world game that follows Rico Rodriguez, an operative for The Agency charged with overthrowing a South American dictator in control of weapons of mass destruction. The games are known for their over-the-top violence and bizarre political storylines. The first one was released in 2006 and there have been three sequels, the most recent in 2018.
So if Dowse’s involvement in a Just Cause movie doesn’t do it for you, perhaps having screenwriter Derek Kolstad does? Kolstad is the writer behind the John Wick films, as well as Marvel’s upcoming Falcon and the Winter Soldier series.
Even as they march across enemy territory things begin to seem off to Chris. Images in shadows, bad dreams, an eerie sense of dread – possibly attributed to the stress of war…but maybe not. Upon laying eyes on the chateau, the men are ecstatic. Finally, a central place with a roof over their heads, beds to sleep in, and food. With these comforts, it does seem curious that the soldiers currently guarding the Chateau are so eager to leave. The team is quick to learn why as almost instantly the spirits within the house began tormenting them. At first smaller things – something falls over, lights go out suddenly, distant noises that may or may not be screams. Then the intensity is ratcheted up, and the soldiers realize they are in more trouble than they thought.
Ghosts of War is full of issues. The first being that the film has slim to no character development whatsoever. It’s so scarce that some of the soldier’s names aren’t even uttered until well into the flick. We know nothing about these people except brief stories from the past and a mention or two of family. This in turn makes it difficult to truly care or form bonds to any of the major players in the film. Horror movies are notorious for boneheaded decisions. This trend continues in full force as a questionable decision after questionable decision keeps getting made. Ghosts of War never truly commits to being a war film or supernatural film and ends up subpar at both.
The scares throughout Ghost of War are mostly cheap jump scares. Someone looks away, looks back, loud noise, and ghost – BOO! I will say that there are a couple of clever shots writer and director Eric Bress inserts into the film. While I did appreciate these brief moments, they are few and far between. In a nutshell, Ghosts of War is comprised of uninspiring characters trudging around a giant house. Then they see a ghost and somehow, we’re at the next scene with only that encounter getting a mention a fraction of the time. To his credit, Bress does try and mix things up, but any twist ultimately falls flat. Ghosts of War is full of typical horror clichés and does not bring anything remotely new to the table. There are far better options than Ghosts of War, and I think you won’t regret passing on this one.
